The Historical Uses of Comment Threads

I’m nearing the final stage of an article about the political implications of “amalgamation” and “miscegenation” in the North during the Civil War. Race baiting and elections apparently never grows old, as Sidney Kaplan’s article on the 1864 flare up argued in 1949, months after the Dixiecrats deployed a similar campaign against Truman. My sources include a series of political cartoons from 1864 that essentially illustrated the Democratic pamphlets meant to parody abolitionists. The pictures essentially illustrated the words in some of the “miscegenation” pamphlets produced by Democrats during the election. They used caricatures of interracial couples as evidence of a world turned upside down — the world that would exist if Abraham Lincoln won the 1864 election and continued to execute the war until the South was defeated and all slaves were freed.

The images, created by G.W. Bromley & Co., are available at the Library of Congress.

A fair amount of scholarship exists on these sorts of racist caricatures. For instance, there are clear connections between these from the 1860s and the earlier “bobalition” broadsides from the days of northern emancipation. Writing about this earlier period in American history, historian Patrick Rael argues that by making black people try and fail to appear respectable (because of their clothing or the dialect in the dialogue bubbles), the creators of these images mocked “blacks’ new claims to participate legitimately in public sphere discourse” (Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest, 73).

These particular images from 1864 also contained a message about gender and sexuality (that could be found in some of the earlier images as well): emancipation would lead to sex between whites and blacks.

Significantly, the pictures do not depict the Jim Crow-era “miscegenation” discourse of sexually aggressive (and economically and politically enfranchised) black men who threaten white womanhood. These cartoons do mock African Americans for putting on airs and presuming to be whites’ social equals, but they also pillory white abolitionists – for their radical ideas and sexual deviancy (the white Republican men at the “Miscegenation Ball,” the white female abolitionists sitting in the laps of black men in the “Millennium of Abolitionism” image.) They use social (and sexual) race mixing as a way to symbolize the impending social and racial disorder that will come with the end of the war.

Much more can and has been said about this (including in my almost-finished article), but what I want to emphasize about these images and the entire “miscegenation” discussion of 1864 is that it was deeply contingent on the fact that emancipation was in play for the upcoming presidential election. While they were, of course, racist, these images (and the various Copperhead Democrat articles about “miscegenation”) were also produced to tie the Republican Party to radical abolitionists and their extremist demands for black equality on top of emancipation.

So, here’s where the title of this post comes into play. When I did a quick Google search to find the “Miscegenation Ball” image this morning (instead of going directly to the Library of Congress website), one of the top hits was from a June 2010 post on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog on the Atlantic website. [Unrelated: are people now writing "weblog" instead of "blog"? I've encountered this three or four times in the past week. Is it just historians trying to sound antiquated?]

Using these images to reflect on the persistence of race baiting in politics, Coates gives a fairly clear and short analysis – including a useful transcript of the text in the images (since it’s hard to read, even on the LOC site). My only quibble with his brief commentary is that he focuses more on how white southerners would have responded to these images, when they were meant for a northern audience. Many white Union men hated the Confederates only slightly more than they hated the radical abolitionists, and Democrats seeking to elect McClellan liked to attack the slaveholding elite as well as abolitionists. Calling out both white slaveholders and radical abolitionists as “amalgamationists” killed two birds with one stone.

What is most interesting to me, as a historian and a history teacher, are the comments. Some of the comments clearly demonstrate the readers’ scholarly knowledge (shout-outs to Edmund Morgan and Kathleen Brown, a mention of Bacon’s Rebellion, Sally Hemmings, etc.). Another thread addressed the depiction of black women in these images and links to an “anti-Michelle Obama’s clothes” discussion that took place on Ravelry, a knitters’ and crocheters’ social media site. Another thread mentions the use of dialect in The Help, and awkward book club discussions on the novel, well before the film version mainstreamed that conversation about race. There are also a  number of comments from people who are “interracially” married. Some just explain their circumstances, others point out the ongoing difficulties, while some wish that they could be at the “miscegenation ball” because it looks like a rocking good time. Many of the comments add biographical details about where people have lived, and how views towards interracial marriage have changed over time.

The comments totally derailed my morning writing.

First, they provide the answer to a future historical question: What kind of reaction do these “miscegenation” images provoke in the 2010s? They lead to mini-histories, a small (and self-selecting) sociological sample of American attitudes toward race and interracial marriage. The comments also reveal thoughtful analysis of the images and how these images relate to other depictions of black Americans.

Yet at the same time, with a few exceptions, I was struck by the absence of historical awareness. Yes, the origins of slavery and the complex racial and gendered politics of colonial Virginia and the class dynamics of Bacon’s Rebellion are undoubtedly important to the history of race in the United States. But they are probably not the best way to approach the racial dynamics in the Union North in 1864. Nor did many commentators note the Civil War, the fact that emancipation happened during a war, and the understudied dynamics of race in the North.

While I would love to parse these 108 comments more (and find other times when historical evidence and widely read blogs coincide), other business calls me to other matters. I’m left with a few questions and conclusions:

On a meta level, I wonder if and how historians will deal with these kinds of sources in the future. They offer a window onto a kind of conversation (Will usernames be like pseudonymous handles of yore? Will future historians comb through blog comments looking for “marcelproust” or “socioprof” as historians now might seek “Africanus” or “Cicero” in nineteenth-century newspapers?)

On a more practical and immediate level, these comments offer insight into my students and, possibly, reading audiences. Often the reaction people have to artifacts of cultural history (especially images like these) are deeply personal. People who see them think about them in terms of how they relate to their own lives and personal histories. Yet it is vital also to understand historical artifacts as embedded in a particular time and space. Racism is not universal and unchanging; it was used differently at different times for different ends. The Democrats behind these caricatures were less concerned with white abolitionists marrying freed people than they were with smearing white Black Republicans. This isn’t to say that the commentators’ reactions about their own marriages are wrong or misplaced, but it is problematic for the takeaway message to be: “Wow. People used to be racist. I’m glad we can marry whomever we want (in New York State, at least) now.”

Finally, since I am immersed in the early 1860s at the moment, this one comment did provoke an exasperated sigh:

“Miscegenation” appears to have originated in the U.S., and coincidentally, the first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an 1864 New York article, reprinted in England. It is defined as the “mixture of races; esp. the sexual union of whites with negroes.”

Weeelllll . . . not exactly. It was a pamphlet from David Goodman Croly and George Wakefield published in December 1863 in New York City. The (pro-South) London Times picked up the story, as well as some other British publications, but it was a very American debate! But rather than be frustrated, I should just get back to work on my article on it, right? Right.

“We have different languages for what the truth means.” – Mike Daisey

In January, I started to write a post about objectivity, “bias,” fact-checking, and the differences between journalism and history. (Phew).  I was inspired in part by the now-infamous “This American Life” episode featuring Mike Daisey’s visit to electronics factories in China – particularly the last 15 minutes when Ira Glass fact-checked the story with other journalists. While this final segment of the original episode hinted at some exaggerations on the part of Daisey, it struck me as an illustrative example for students. When I heard that Glass retracted the story this past Friday, I decided to revisit my post. While comparisons to other recent-ish fact/fiction debacles (Michael Bellesiles, James Frey, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, etc.) may be apt, I’m not getting into those here.

Then: What I Wrote in January

My high school journalism teacher showed us All the President’s Men in order to teach us how dogged and determined journalists like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman had to get two sources to confirm every piece of information they printed. We learned that they weren’t biased, and they didn’t report unsubstantiated information. They reported the facts.

[Fact Check! (All the President's Men)]

More recently, I listened to the “This American Life” episode adapting Mike Daisey’s one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” about Apple’s Chinese factories and suppliers. I found Daisey’s performance to be somewhere between effectively moving and over-the-top. But, of particular interest was the last portion of the show — a fact-checking exercise in which Ira Glass interviewed several other journalists and writers who had also covered the story. Was Daisey’s story sound? Was he a biased observer? He didn’t pretend to be a real journalist, after all. It turns out that his story did hold up, although his claims about the amount of child labor at Foxconn appear to be somewhat exaggerated.

I’ve been thinking about assigning this episode to my classes to spark a conversation about sources. As I’ve taught research seminars, I’ve thought more about the differences between journalistic research and historical research, and my sense is that students don’t always understand the distinction. If one of the Chinese workers whom Daisey interviewed lied to him, and he reported it as truth, what does this mean? What kinds of evidence do we trust, and which do we question, and why?

I find that students often have this backwards. When they read scholarly articles and books, they will accuse the authors of being “biased” because they are pursuing an argument instead of “just presenting the evidence.” Well, yes. She is “biased” because her article has an argument. While quick to find “bias” in scholarly articles and books, students sometimes have a very hard time identifying “biases” when they read primary sources. If the source said it, and the source lived in 1745, then it must be true!

My pedagogical strategy at the moment is to point out examples of evidence and analysis in every reading we do in class. I also use lots of primary sources, and I have students write short analyses throughout the semester so they become used to the language of introducing and analyzing quotations. Even with these exercises in place, I still find that learning how to gauge evidence is often the hardest skill to teach and to learn. It requires a breadth of knowledge that students’ frankly don’t have. How do they know that the New York Herald was a Democratic newspaper during the Civil War when it just pops up as another article in a keyword search? They don’t. The best I can do is teach them that they should always inquire and always ask: is this source “biased?”

Rethinking all of this after the Retraction . . .

Needles and Geese

In the process of revising an article on the “miscegenation controversy” of 1864, I found myself on an archival goose chase. In November 1863, the anti-abolitionist New York Herald printed an article accusing its rival paper, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, of publishing ads in which black volunteers in Arkansas sought white abolitionist women as correspondents who would become their wives. Unfortunately, the Herald couldn’t be more specific than saying that these appeared “the other day” (“The Tribune Philosophers Promoting the Amalgamation of the Races,” New York Herald, 27 Nov. 1863).

My instinct was that this was a fake story about made-up advertisements. Throughout 1863 and 1864, the Herald published rumors about race mixing with a particular focus on black soldiers, and this seems like another iteration. But unlike the usually unsubstantiated rumors, this article included quotations from the supposed ads published in the Tribune.

Using the America’s Historical Newspapers database, and focusing my search on October and November 1863, I did some searches for those quoted phrases that seemed most likely to have appeared in the Tribune: “matrimony,” “Arkansas,” “correspondence,” etc. After about an hour of this, I had yet to find the original ads in the Tribune or any other paper included in the database except for the original Herald article. I feel confident enough to include this incident in my article as a rumor rather than a reality, at least with the proper qualifying words in a footnote.

A page from the New York Herald, 1/28/1863

But — and here’s where the delight of the research goose chase comes in — in the process of seeking out those specific phases, I stumbled upon the fascinating world of the want-ads from the 1860s. So many “Strangers to the city,” “respectable gentleman,” and soldiers looking for potential wives! Like personal ads today, nineteenth-century folk also tended to be very specific when it came to age, as the last ad above (“not over 19 years old”). I wonder what the story behind this southerner in search of a Yankee wife might have been.

I knew that nineteenth-century newspapers had tons of these short ads, but I’d never looked at them closely before except for using runaway slave ads in teaching. Now, I’m filing this away as a source for some future project. Lost items, personal ads, cryptic communications, and even the nineteenth-century version of missed connections. It reminds a bit of Found Magazine: mysterious and intriguing, fleeting, and very human. Some other intriguing samples:

“The sister of Phillip Tynan is Troubled by his silence. Direct to 117 Houston Street, NY.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“Will the young lady who was last Tuesday in a Twenty-Third Street stage from 11 to 12 o’clock send her address to the gentleman she recognized in another stage? Address E.P. Station D.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“MATRIMONIAL: Two young ladies wish to make the acquaintance of two Spanish or French gentlemen of wealth with a view to matrimony. Address, enclosing carte des visite, Lorini and Evangeline, Box 123, Herald office.” [NY Herald, 9 January 1863]

“Florence, — Will you give me the opportunity to explain my conduct Monday evening? Yes? When and where? –J. New York Post Office.” [NY Herald, 28 January 1863].

Analyzing Indices

I’ve been revising an article this week, and I needed to revisit an old and familiar source: James Thome and Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies (1838). The text praised the favorable results of emancipation in Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica, critiqued the apprenticeship system and gradual emancipation, and it became a popular resource for abolitionists making the case for immediate emancipation in the United States.

I was interested to see how Thome (the primary author – Kimball died not long after the two returned to the United States) wrote about “amalgamation” and interracial marriage amid West Indian emancipation since this was a touchy subject even among the most radical white abolitionists. I did a keyword search on Google Books’ version of the text to see where “amalgamation” appeared, and among the few pages were several from the index.

I found that the book’s index had an entry for “Amalgamation,” as well as:

Promiscuous seating in church, 21 (See “Amalgamation” etc.)

Intermixture, 76, 79, 287 (See “Amalgamation.”)

The pages corresponding to the index entry for “Amalgamation” turned out to be passages related to interracial social scenes, not interracial marriage. Thome and Kimball described how white families sat next to colored and black families in church; as well as recounting how they had dined alongside white, black, and colored ministers and their wives. While the book does contain discussions of “licentiousness” during slavery (see p. 98-101 for example), the index entry for “Amalgamation” did not point to these pages.

This struck me as quite interesting — and it suggests the usefulness of looking at an index for insight into ideas about categories and language. In what I think might be a useful research move, it also led me to question how abolitionists used the term “amalgamation” in their own writings.

Before this, my sense had been that the term “amalgamation” was almost always used by the opponents of abolitionism. (For examples, see the American Antiquarian Society‘s online exhibit of the “Practical Amalgamation” series). Opponents of emancipation could take advantage of the slippery meaning of the word — it could refer to benign social mixing, a mixed labor force that threatened white workingmen’s jobs and social status, or the more illicit subjects of sex and interracial marriage.

Abolitionists – like James Thome and his editor, Theodore Weld – rarely used this term to describe themselves or their plans for emancipation in the United States – or so I had thought. In thinking about what I’ve read, it seems that abolitionists in the 1830s almost only referred to “amalgamation” when they were discrediting accusations that they were “amalgamationists.” Instead, they would point to licentious white southern slaveholders as the real culprits of “amalgamation.”

So why did Thome and Weld include “Amalgamation” in their index? Were they trying, in some small way, to reclaim the word and to distinguish it from its sexual connotations? It looks like they might have been trying to do just that, and if I hadn’t looked at the index, I would have missed this point. They didn’t use the word very much in the text of the book, but the pages in the index under “Amalgamation” included descriptions of families clearly distinguished by their race (negro/colored/white) who were not intermarrying but worshipping together in church, dining together in “civilized” dining rooms, and discussing the issues of the day together in middle-class parlors.

What I used to do, Part III

Or, how I’ve adapted the old to fit with the new.

"Amanuensis," Scribes in the Abbey of Echternach (Luxembourg), Manuscript from the 11th century.

When I’m at an archive, I transcribe and I take copious notes. I recreate documents in huge Word documents that I can “find and search” later. I also keep a separate document for commentary — my notes, my research questions, and leads for future research.

On a recent trip to the New-York Historical Society, my confidence faded when one of the archivists tentatively told me that the speech I was reading and transcribing was also online. “You know . . . you can actually read this on archive.org . . .” she trailed off. Here I was, typing as fast as I could when everything I was entering into my laptop could be accessed at any time from my couch. A crisis of archival faith.

(An aside: this wasn’t the first time I experienced this. In Boston last spring, a very kind and helpful archivist boasted about how many abolitionists’ letters they had digitized. She told me that I could just look at those letters online. Pause. Yes, I said, but I’m here. In Boston. I could understand that she wanted to protect the documents from being handled too much, but what was I supposed to do now? Did she want me to sit in the reading room and read the letters on my computer? Did that even count as research? Historians are still supposed to go to archives, right? To paraphrase Mindy Kaling: was everyone else going online without me? (Seriously: what is everyone else doing? I know many archives aren’t online, but as so many become digitized, is this the way of the future? Is it naïve to still want to see and handle documents in person?))

After learning that the speeches I was reading at the New-York Historical Society were online, I debated whether I should just finish up early and go home. But. During the past few hours, I’d had more productive thoughts than I’d had in the past two weeks. I wasn’t just reading these speeches from 1864 — I was thinking about them, making connections, and my article’s outline had started to come together. The quiet room, the time crunch (. . . have to finish this speech before lunch), and the coffee I’d had earlier in the morning had created the ideal conditions for inspiration.

Later in the day, it hit me: this is what I need in my digital research! I need to find a way to create these conditions when I’m reading the 45 PDFs from the New York Tribune or the Google Book I’ve downloaded to my iPad.

So, to conclude this series of posts: how do I institute slowness in a research environment where speed and quantity rule? I’ve started to transcribe again. I organize the many newspaper articles I’ve been collecting in folders in DropBox, each titled with the date, the newspaper, and something of the headline or topic. I can then access them via my iPad with iAnnotate or Good Reader, programs that allows me to zoom in and out so that I can see the entire article or page. I also store Google Books (I’ve been reading nineteenth-century memoirs of dead missionaries most recently) on my iPad. The key is to treat these documents as if they aren’t digital. When I’m reading them, I open a Word document on my computer and I read through the documents as if I’m in a reading room at an archive. I transcribe long passages, I take notes, and I write out my thoughts.

This felt like unnecessary labor at first because it’s counterintuitive to the promise of accessibility. I don’t need to transcribe these documents. I have them with me basically all of the time. But this was beside the point. For me, the transcribed passages themselves are less important than the time I spend transcribing and taking notes. The process puts slowness back into my process and sets aside time to think.

Part I and Part II